Change Papers: A shared effort to change North Carolina's climate for innovation.

My 9-year-old son nearly caused a single car accident last week. On the way to a basketball game, he asked the question every Psych-English major parent dreads: “How does chemistry work, Dad?” As someone who hangs out with scientists sometimes during the day, I felt the pressure: I had to get this one right.  My [...]

Ouch. North Carolina has just blown through a couple of Maginot lines we really didn’t want to cross. We’ve just crossed the 500,000 unemployed mark — a half million people who want work can’t find it. And unemployment jumped north of 11% on Friday — to a 30-year high.
With more than 90% of our jobs [...]

The January 14 first meeting of the Governor’s Innovation Council showed the promise and the challenge of such councils.
On the one hand, there was a good chunk of energy in the room as a mix of big and small businessmen and women, elected officials, government types, higher ed folks, venture capitalists, nonprofit leaders and others [...]

This Thursday the Governor’s Innovation Council will kick off what appears to be a couple of year’s worth of meetings, 9:00 am- 12:30 pm at the NC Museum of Natural Science in downtown Raleigh.
The Council, co-chaired by Steve Nelson of the Wakefield Group and Al Delia, the Governor’s Senior Policy Advisor, looks to have 30 [...]

‘Tis the season – for resolutions. We love to make em; we tend to break ‘em. But what if people got a gift to help them keep their resolution? We’ve arranged ten gifts with ten key NC innovation players for 2010 in mix ‘n match format.

The efforts of other states confirm what we already knew. To grow more innovative companies that create more and better jobs, North Carolina will have to address some of our capital gaps.

Now the good news: we in North Carolina are not alone. Some other states are smacking their foreheads too (and other nations, as well, as noted in Paper 02 and here), and the sorts of things they are trying as they recover from their head slaps can give us some good ideas about what works and what doesn’t.

David Brooks’ op-ed in the New York Times December 8 takes a look at President Obama’s “national innovation agenda,” and highlights nine things the columnist thinks are important about it. Whether you agree or not with what his  nine things are, the op-ed is valuable mostly as a reminder that there is a developing “national [...]

In this paper, guest poster Ted Zoller, associate professor for entrepreneurship at Kenan-Flagler Business School and Executive Director of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, makes a key distinction between two creative parts of what we have defined as innovation (See Paper 02): invention – the act of creating a new technology, product, process or [...]

Profiles in Innovation is a developing series of imagined “case studies,” looking at what could happen in North Carolina if we change nothing OR if we take steps to become the most innovative place in the world.